Functional Progressions, Cadences and Modulation

This module builds toward the harmonic move that separates a looping jam from a set with a story: steering a pattern somewhere and landing it. In a live-coded set — a chord pattern feeding a pad synth, a bassline sketching the roots — the audience feels arrival and departure long before they can name it. A 16-bar passage that establishes home, cadences convincingly, then lifts into a related key is the core gesture behind every “the drop changed key” moment in electronic music, and it is exactly what the capstone asks you to build and annotate.

The arc starts supported: sketch short I–IV–V loops using the three functional poles as your map, then use root movement by fourths, thirds, and seconds as the logic for extending them into longer phrases. Next come the punctuation drills — resolving the dominant seventh’s tritone into the tonic for a perfect cadence, then contrasting it with the softer plagal “amen” landing (IV–I, without any dominant-seventh tension) — repeated until V7-to-I is a reflex, because the modulation step depends on it. The final scaffold layer introduces the dominant seventh of a target key as the pivot for a real key change, and harmonic rhythm as the throttle: slowing chord changes before the modulation, compressing them after, so the shift reads as intentional.

Every required atom gates the capstone directly: you cannot annotate root movement, land both cadences, or modulate via V7 without them. The supporting atoms enrich rather than gate — the diatonic triad system (revisited from the prerequisite module) widens your chord palette beyond I, IV, and V, and smooth voice leading makes the same progressions sound polished on layered pads, but the capstone can be earned without either.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

drone

osc 55 >> audio

_{punctual-0001 · CC0-1.0}

SinOsc s => dac;

_{chuck-0001 · MIT}

scale-constraint

n("0 2 4 6").scale("c:minor")

_{strudel-0009 · CC0}

play (scale :c4, :minor).tick; sleep 0.25

_{sonicpi-0012 · CC0}

chord-progression

play_chord progression.tick, release: 4, amp: 0.5; sleep 4

_{sonicpi-0017 · CC0}

Pbind(\degree, Pseq([[0, 2, 4], [3, 5, 7], [4, 6, 8], [0, 2, 4]], 1), \dur, 2).play

_{supercollider-0031 · CC0}

chord-extension

[60,63,67,70] @=> int ch[]; SawOsc s => ADSR e => dac; e.set(2::ms,120::ms,0,2::ms);
for(0=>int i;i<ch.size();i++){ Std.mtof(ch[i]) => s.freq; e.keyOn(); 150::ms => now; }

_{chuck-0035 · MIT}